Despite harsh condemnation from US
legislators in response to Uganda’s
draft bill criminalising homosexuality, the Senate passed a bill in
mid-March that will prop up Uganda’s government by authorising military
action in the highly volatile region of Central Africa. Introduced last
May, the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda
Recovery Act aims to ‘support stabilisation and lasting peace’ in
Northern Uganda – the site of conflict between the Ugandan government
and the rebel group Lords Resistance Army (LRA) since 1986. The bill
calls for an assessment of options through which the United States,
working with regional governments, ‘could help develop and support
multilateral efforts to eliminate the threat posed by the Lord’s
Resistance Army’.[1]

While the bill allocates funding towards humanitarian aid and
post-conflict justice and reconciliation processes, the primary focus
in Congress is on a military strategy to ‘apprehend or otherwise
remove’ LRA leaders. And despite the bill’s requirement that the
government of Uganda commit to ‘transparent and accountable’
reconstruction efforts, it makes no similar demands of a military
operation, thereby giving a green light to extrajudicial executions.
With recent reports of US military drones flying over Mogadishu to help
the transitional government in Somalia to track the Shabaab resistance,
we can expect a similar ‘multilateral’ approach to eliminating the LRA.

The bill emerged in response to aggressive calls, not from the Ugandan
people, but from a handful of US-based organisations. Much like the
Save Darfur Coalition has done with Sudan, groups like the Enough
Project, Invisible Children, and Resolve Uganda have developed an
influential voice in Washington that speaks on behalf of Africans
thousands of miles away, calling for the US to facilitate ‘peace’ in
conflict zones through military intervention.